But the true seal was set on her regeneration when she was invited to
join the boarders' Literary Society; of which Cupid and Mary were the
leading spirits. This carried her back, at one stroke, into the swing
of school life. For everybody who was anybody belonged to the society.
And, despite her friendship with the head of her class, Laura still
knew what it was to get the cold shoulder.
But this was to some extent her own fault. At the present stage of her
career she was an extraordinarily prickly child, and even to her two
sponsors did not at times present a very amiable outside: like a
hedgehog, she was ever ready to shoot out her spines. With regard, that
is, to her veracity. She had been so badly grazed, in her recent
encounter, that she was now constantly seeing doubt where no doubt was;
and this wakeful attitude of suspicion towards others did not make for
brotherly love. The amenity of her manners suffered, too: though she
kept to her original programme of not saying all she thought, yet what
she was forced to say she blurted out in such a precise and blunt
fashion that it made a disagreeable impression. At the same time, a
growing pedantry in trifles warped both her imagination and her
sympathies: under the aegis of M. P., she rapidly learned to be the
latter's rival in an adherence to bald fact, and in her contumely for
those who departed from it. Indeed, before the year spent in Mary's
company was out, Laura was well on the way towards becoming one of
those uncomfortable people who, concerned only for their own salvation,
fire the truth at you on every occasion, without regard for your tender
places.--So she remained but scantly popular.
Hence, her admission to the Literary Society augured well.
Her chief qualifications for membership were that she could make
verses, and was also very fond of reading. At school, however, this
taste had been quiescent; for books were few. Still, she had read
whatever she could lay hands on, and for the past half-year or more she
had fared like a little pig in a clover field. Since Christmas, she was
one of the few permitted to do morning practice on the grand piano in
Mrs. Strachey's drawing-room--an honour, it is true, not overmuch
valued by its recipients, for Mrs. Gurley's bedroom lay just above, and
that lady could swoop down on whoever was weak enough to take a little
rest. But Laura snapped her fingers at such a flimsy objection; for
this was the wonderful room round the walls of which low, open
bookshelves ran; and she was soon bold enough, on entering, hastily to
select a book to read while she played, always on the alert to pop it
behind her music, should anyone come into the room.
For months, she browsed unchecked. As her choice had to be made with
extreme celerity, and from those shelves nearest the piano, it was in
the nature of things that it was not invariably a happy one. For some
time she had but moderate luck, and sampled queer foods. To these must
be reckoned a translation of FAUST, which she read through, to the end
of the First Part at least, with a kind of dreary wonder why such a
dull thing should be called great. For her next repast, she sought hard
and it was in the course of this rummage that she had the strangest
find of all. Running a skilled eye over the length of a shelf close at
hand, she hit on a slim, blue volume, the title of which at once
arrested her attention. For, notwithstanding her fourteen years, and
her dabblings in Richardson and Scott, Laura's liking for a real
child's book was as strong as it had ever been; and A DOLL'S HOUSE
seemed to promise good things. Deftly extracting the volume, she struck
up her scales and began to read.
This was the day on which, after breakfast, Mrs. Gurley pulverised her
with the remark: "A new, and, I must say, extremely interesting,
fashion of playing scales, Laura Rambotham! To hold, the forte pedal
down, from beginning to end!"
Laura was unconscious of having sinned in this way. But it might quite
well be so. For she had spent a topsy-turvy, though highly engrossing
hour. In place of the children's story she anticipated, she had found
herself, on opening the book, confronted by the queerest stuff she had
ever seen in print. From the opening sentence on. To begin with, it was
a play--and Laura had never had a modern prose play in her hand
before--and then it was all about the oddest, yet the most commonplace
people. It seemed to her amazingly unreal--how these people spoke and
behaved--she had never known anyone like them; and yet again so true,
in the way it dragged in everyday happenings, so petty in its rendering
of petty things, that it bewildered and repelled her: why, some one
might just as well write a book about Mother or Sarah! Her young,
romantic soul rose in arms against this, its first bluff contact with
realism, against such a dispiriting sobriety of outlook. Something
within her wanted to cry out in protest as she read--for read she did,
on three successive days, with an interest she could not explain. And
that was not all. It was worse that the people in this book--the
extraordinary person who was married, and had children, and yet ate
biscuits out of a bag and said she didn't; the man who called her his
lark and his squirrel--as if any man ever did call his wife such
names!--all these people seemed eternally to be meaning something
different from what they said; something that was for ever eluding her.
It was most irritating.-- There was, moreover, no mention of a doll's
house in the whole three acts.
The state of confusion this booklet left her in, she allayed with a
little old brown leather volume of Longfellow. And HYPERION was so much
more to her liking that she even ventured to borrow it from its place
on the shelf, in order to read it at her leisure, braving the chance
that her loan, were it discovered, might be counted against her as a
theft.
It hung together, no doubt, with the after-effects of her dip into
Ibsen that, on her sitting down to write the work that was to form her
passport to the Society, her mind should incline to the most romantic
of romantic themes. Not altogether, though: Laura's taste, such as it
was, for literature had, like all young people's, a mighty bias towards
those books which turned their backs on reality: she sought not truth,
but the miracle. However, though she had thus taken sides, there was
still a yawning gap to be bridged between her ready acceptance of the
honourable invitation, and the composition of a masterpiece. Thanks to
her wonted inability to project her thoughts beyond the moment, she had
been so unthinking of possible failure that Cupid had found it
necessary to interject: "Here, I say, don't blow!" Whereas, when she
came to write, she sat with her pen poised over the paper for nearly
half an hour, without bringing forth a word. First, there was the
question of form: she considered, then abruptly dismissed, the idea of
writing verses: the rhymes with love and dove, and heart and part,
which could have been managed, were, she felt, too silly and
sentimental to be laid before her quizzical audience. Next, what to
write about--a simple theme, such as a fairy-tale, was not for a moment
to be contemplated. No, Laura had always flown her hawk high, and she
was now bent on making a splutter. It ended by being a toss-up between
a play in the Shakesperian manner and a novel after Scott. She decided
on the novel. It should be a romance of Venice, with abundant murder
and mystery in it, and a black, black villain, such as her soul
loved--no macaroon-nibblers or rompers with children for her! And
having thus attuned her mind to scarlet deeds, she set to work. But she
found it tremendously difficult to pin her story to paper: she saw
things clearly enough, and could have related them by word of mouth;
but did she try to write them down they ran to mist; and though she
toiled quite literally in the sweat of her brow, yet when the eventful
day came she had but three niggardly pages to show for her pains.
About twenty girls formed the Society, which assembled one Saturday
evening in an empty music-room. All were not, of course, equally
productive: some had brought it no further than a riddle: and it was
just these drones who, knowing nothing of the pother composition
implied, criticised most stringently the efforts of the rest. Several
members had pretty enough talents, Laura's two room-mates among the
number: on the night Laura made her debut, the weightiest achievement
was, without doubt, M. P.'s essay on "Magnanimity"; and Laura's eyes
grew moist as she listened to its stirring phrases. Next best--to her
thinking, at least--was a humorous episode by Cupid, who had a gift
that threw Laura into a fit of amaze; and this was the ability to
expand infinitely little into infinitely much; to rig out a trifle in
many words, so that in the end it seemed ever so much bigger than it
really was--just as a thrifty merchant boils his oranges, to swell them
to twice their size.
Laura being the youngest member, her affair came last on the programme:
she had to sit and listen to the others, her cheeks hot, her hands very
cold. Presently all were done, and then Cupid, who was chairman, called
on "a new author, Rambotham, who it is hoped will prove a valuable
acquisition to the Society, to read us his maiden effort".
Laura rose to her feet and, trembling with nervousness, stuttered forth
her prose. The three little pages shot past like a flash; she had
barely stood up before she was obliged to sit down again, leaving her
hearers, who had only just re-adopted their listening attitudes, agape
with astonishment. She could have endured, with phlegm, the ridicule
this malheur earned her: what was harder to stomach was that her paper
heroics made utterly no impression. She suffered all the humiliation of
a flabby fiasco, and, till bedtime, shrank out of her friends' way.
"You were warned not to be too cocky, you know," Mary said judicially,
on seeing her downcast air.
"I didn't mean to be, really.--Then you don't think what I wrote was up
to much, M. P.?"
"Mm," said the elder girl, in a non-committal way.
Here Cupid chimed in. "Look here, Infant, I want to ask you something.
Have you ever been in Venice?"
"No."
"Ever seen a gondola?"
"No."
"Or the Doge's palace?--or a black-cloaked assassin?--or a masked lady?"
"You know I haven't," murmured Laura, humbled to the dust.
"And probably never will. Well then, why on earth try to write wooden,
second-hand rubbish like that?"
"Second-hand? ... But Cupid ... think of Scott! He couldn't have seen
half he told about?"
"My gracious!" ejaculated Cupid, and sat down and fanned herself with a
hairbrush. "You don't imagine you're a Scott, do you? Here, hold me, M.
P., I'm going to faint!"--and at Laura's quick and scarlet denial, she
added: "Well, why the unmentionable not use the eyes the Lord has given
you, and write about what's before them every day of your life?"
"Do you think that would be better?"
"I don't think--I know it would."
But Laura was not so easily convinced as all that.
Ever a talented imitator, she next tried her hand at an essay on an
abstract subject. This was a failure: you could not SEE things, when
you wrote about, say, "Beneficence"; and Laura's thinking was done
mainly in pictures. Matters were still worse when she tinkered at
Cupid's especial genre: her worthless little incident stared at her,
naked and scraggy, from the sheet; she had no wealth of words at her
disposal in which to deck it out. So, with a sigh, she turned back to
the advice Cupid had given her, and prepared to make a faithful
transcript of actuality. She called what she now wrote: "A Day at
School", and conscientiously set down detail on detail; so fearful,
this time, of over-brevity, that she spun the account out to twenty
pages; though the writing of it was as distasteful to her as her
reading of A DOLL'S HOUSE had been.
At the subsequent meeting of the Society, expression of opinion was not
lacking.
"Oh, Jehoshaphat! How much more?"
"Here, let me get out. I've had enough."
"I say, you forgot to count how many steps it took you to come
downstairs."
Till the chairman had pity on the embarrassed author and said: "Look
here, Laura, I think you'd better keep the rest for another time."
"It was just what you told me to do," Laura reproached Cupid that
night: she was on the brink of tears.
But Cupid was disinclined to shoulder the responsibility. "Told you to
be as dull and long-winded as that? Infant, it's a whacker!"
"But it was TRUE what I wrote--every word of it."
Neither of the two elder girls was prepared to discuss this vital
point. Cupid shifted ground. "Good Lord, Laura, but it's hard to drive
a thing into YOUR brain-pan.--You don't need to be ALL true on paper,
silly child!"
"Last time you said I had to."
"Well, if you want it, my candid opinion is that you haven't any talent
for this kind of thing.--Now turn off the gas."
As the light in the room went out, a kind of inner light seemed to go
up in Laura; and both then and on the following days she thought hard.
She was very ambitious, anxious to shine, not ready to accept defeat;
and to the next literary contest she brought the description of an
excursion to the hills and gullies that surrounded Warrenega; into
which she had worked an adventure with some vagrant blacks. She and Pin
and the boys had often picnicked on these hills, with their lunches
packed in billies; and she had seen the caves and rocky holes where
blackfellows were said to have hidden themselves in early times; but
neither this particular excursion, nor the exciting incident which she
described with all the aplomb of an eyewitness, had ever taken place.
That is to say: not a word of her narration was true, but every word of
it might have been true.
And with this she had an unqualified success.
"I believe there's something in you after all," said Cupid to her that
night. "Anyhow, you know now what it is to be true, yet not dull and
prosy."
And Laura manfully choked back her desire to cry out that not a word of
her story was fact.
She was long in falling asleep. Naturally, she was elated and excited
by her success; but also a new and odd piece of knowledge had niched
itself in her brain. It was this. In your speech, your talk with
others, you must be exact to the point of pedantry, and never romance
or draw the long-bow; or you would be branded as an abominable liar.
Whereas, as soon as you put pen to paper, provided you kept one foot
planted on probability, you might lie as hard as you liked: indeed, the
more vigorously you lied, the louder would be your hearers' applause.
And Laura fell asleep over a chuckle.